majestic

For real now? There was a proposed sequel that's been stuck in development hell for a while.

I'll address these both in one paragraph, makes it easier and more concise. First of all, let me ask you a question, would you really have liked more focus on Mamoru and Usagi as a couple? Because that is what Crystal does, and you know how that ended. There's a possibility that the original anime writers could have made something out of it, something interesting, but in reality they were barely capable of juggling all the threads and giving all the characters something to do. It's the fundamental limitation of writing an ensemble cast show by the seat of your pants. It's a bit clear that the anime writers dropped the ball on this one. While - and I've said that time and again, like a broken record - the source material isn't free of problems, it does make a few things a lot clearer. Mamoru isn't "mean" to Usagi in the way he is in the anime, not beyond their first meeting, after which he is just mysterious and calls her bun-head when they meet. Usagi is also immediately attracted to him. Mamoru is too, and there are the problematic bits of this, while Usagi tells the reader that ("Why is my heart pounding?"), Mamoru gets to show his affection by being a complete creep. The thing here is, it is kind of excusable for an early 90ies work. The tropes used are still in play today, you just need to read any of the romantic young adult literature that's out there, or worse, adult "romantic" literature. Talking about these would be a book, not just a longer post, in itself. There are apparently still a lot of men and women who think that certain gestures are romantic instead of creepy as long as there's enough attraction between the people involved. Now for the together because they were together. In the manga, the girls also get their memories of their former lifetime back. Presumably that happens in the anime too, but they never really talk about it. Crystal adds a certain non-canon part to this that was Naoko Takeuchi's original intention that never really manifested because the manga's creation was under similar time constraints that the anime was, namely that Endymion's entourage were paired off with Serenity's. In Crystal, at least, the girls not only get their memories back, but also their past feelings with them. In the manga, while that only happens to Mamoru and Usagi because the past romance was left out (and later changed for Rei to always have included a vow of dedication and celibacy to Serenity) it's at least very clear that their feelings for each other simply resume from where they left off in the past. If we take the anime on its own, it's not at all clear. In the end, it looks like they stick together because they're supposed to, especially when you factor SuperS in. Which I would really argue that, beyond what happens in the power up episodes (for character development reasons), we really should not. The scene KP mentioned where Mamoru looks visibly uncomfortable justifying his relationship with Usagi to Fish-Eye were incredibly uncomfortable to watch, because there is no reason at all to deal with Usagi's nonsense in SuperS. I think that the scene, written by Yoji Enokido*, who also worked on Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena, is also there to make Mamoru his AND the audience's stand in that is left in bewilderment at what they're actually having to write and watch in this season. Mamoru doesn't know why he's in a relationship with Usagi at this point any more than we, the audience, know why we're watching this dumpster fire, Mr. Enokido doesn't know why he's writing this (and ends up quitting at Toei). Who knows, maybe it really is love, but it really also is because it is love carried over from the distant past. *Added for emphasis insofar as that Sailor Moon usually isn't that subtle, unless in episodes written by him. Further explanation (just hidden in spoilers because post long enough, amirite?): When it comes to romance she's in the same boat as Ami, Rei or Minako, but she sure served as a punching bag at times. Minako's story with Alan is perhaps a tad more tragic, but not when viewed through Makoto's issues. Minako has issues too, but they're different. And then there's her SuperS assault episode which is easily the worst of the core cast's. Not the worst episode, but the worst experience any of the five have to go through (even though the trophy for having the most horrific assault scenes goes to Unazuki and Reika, oh boy).

Two paragraphs might not be an essay, but it sure starts like that. You've already thought their relationship through and came to what we could call an abstract. All that's missing is... a more detailed explanation and some citations. The only ones of the core cast that even have a relationship other than Mamoru and Usagi are Haruka and Michiru, and they clearly have a much better relationship than the former two, xenophobic as they are at times. Secondary characters, well, there are Usagi's parents and Naru with her Umino. They seem to be happy, but they are barely around after R. Rei with Mamoru was odd, and it always seemed Mamoru dated her because he had nothing else to do, not because he seemed to be very interested. For a while I thought Rei did that to annoy Usagi, but she seemed to have really cared, with her offering the temple for him to stay at after she ruined his room and being really annoyed at Usagi for her insinuating that she might try something (and also, like everything in this utter waste of a season, Diana goes and makes it SUPER CREEPY by offering to be Mamoru's chaperone, insinuating that she expects Rei to hop on top of him the moment they're alone). That leaves a lot of other side characters that never went anywhere, like Yuichiro, Makoto's Kenji and Ryo. I'm not sure why Ryo was dropped*. He knew Ami was Sailor Mercury, they shared common interests and Ami never expressed anything more for someone else. Except fangirling after composers and the Three Lights. I also just made the mistake of googling a bit for any other side characters I might have missed, and found a list of fan-shipped couples that could have been. I want to scour the Earth of people who think that any of the Inner Senshi in the anime are supposedly coded to be lesbian or have lesbian subtext (there is subtext in the manga for Rei and Minako). They don't and aren't guys, please stop that. Chibi-Usa has two potential relationships, one of which I don't want to talk about, and the other is Hotaru, which requires way too much mind-bending to make it work. I recently came up with an idea for one last examination post, and that's character arcs beyond Usagi. The short gist is that, if we allow the SuperS power up episodes to stand there while ignoring the rest of the season, we can reasonably conclude that almost everyone's arc is kind of closed... except Makoto and her senpai. It would have been really nice to give Makoto an episode in Sailor Stars where she finally frees herself of that. Sure it made for a fun running gag (and I answered one of my earlier questions if Makoto and Ami ever talked to each other alone - yes, they did, in early R when Makoto talks about how Ali/Ail could be the Moonlight Knight and Ami asks if he reminds her of her lost love. Makoto initially says no, but then says both love music, and Ami just falls over in embarrassment). So they do talk to each other, but they fail the Bechdel test in the process. So yes, two actual couples in the core cast, two side couples that don't really show up after R, and lots of "what if?"s. For a show about five girls fighting for love and justice, that's not much, is it? There is a non-canon manga side story where the daughters of Ami, Rei, Makoto and Minako try to befriend Usagi's second child. I'm going with that. Yep. *I mean, in-universe. It's perfectly understandable why the writers dropped that.

That's the clip I saw yesterday that made me comment on Usagi's voice in the DiC dub. Because it sure sounds like there's an age difference here, just between middle age Usagi and her teenage boytoy. Oh, and welcome to the Sailor Moon Essay Club. Here's your membership card, member #2. Shiny and gold, like Ami's. Heh.

But it's only like 60 hours (200 episodes á 24 minutes, net runtime between 18 and 20 minutes). Less if you skip all the stock footage. No, seriously, that's fair, in that case you'd probably really wouldn't enjoy it. The best parts of Sailor Moon are (in)arguably the slice of life parts where you just follow five funny teenage girls doing... a whole bunch of silly things, and sometimes they study, get turned into giant tennis balls, deal with children that (literally) fall from the sky and when they're not busy with anything else they save the world. Heh. Sounds like Puella Magi Madoka Magica could be more your thing, that's technically the same genre as Sailor Moon, just a completely different take - and it's short (12 20 minutes episodes or two 2h runtime films, depending on what you can stream or want to watch - films look better, but are the same thing). Whelp, we tried. Looks like the Sailor Moon club really is coming to an end. Sorry, can't help with that. Future Boy Conan looks like something I could easily have liked, but it never got a German dub, so it's really missing from my "seen in childhood" list of anime (that interestingly enough is really full of Takahata's work, but a lot less Miyazaki for some reason - guess not depressing enough for children? ). Nadia was on TV, but at a time when I was still watching Attack No. 1, so, yeah. Might be a good idea to put them both on the "to watch" list.

True, but we're also kind of trying to convince LC to watch, so psssht!

Just looked it up, she was in her early 30ies. Not bad. Usagi had two different VAs in the German dub. The first season was the same woman that does Lisa Simpson in the German dub, which is really distracting while watching Sailor Moon. Her replacement also sounds like Usagi's age (or should I say Bunny in this case?), a bit softer and less shrill, which was a nice change. First season Usagi also had a little too much of a... uhm, German accent*. I mean, not much, and there are far worse examples (mostly in regular actors though, not in voice actors), but it's there. Pluto had three different VAs (one of which went on to voice Seiya). Ikuko takes the cake though. Five different VAs (three "regular" ones and two that voiced one episode each - not that Ikuko showed up much after R). *Without context that's probably a little strange, right?

The VA was weird after getting used to the Japanese voices by now, but it's okay-ish. I just clicked a bit through the Sailor Says! Channel and dear god, Usagi sounds like a 60 year old woman. But yes, she doesn't really sound like a 14 year old girl. Shinji does, more so, huh? Literally in the Japanese version, what with the voice of Haruka... heh. @LadyCrimson Maybe the Professor will convince you? Hmm? Or maybe not. It's also kind of a fake out because that guy won't show up until you're like 90 episodes in. Hmm. Not helping, am I?

We're trying to sell the anime to someone new, not immediately start with the dub that made it an even bigger meme than it already was to begin with.

The Japanese lady has better pronunciation, but they both really sound like they're just reading words from a paper. That last word... should be "nun" (now, in this instance) I guess, which has a much longer vowel than what she's saying. You need to be careful if you watched English clips, there's the, uhm, old dub that's really... something else, and the new dub that's actually good. It's middle school - Usagi's 14 in the beginning. School is a part of it, but not all. It's beyond silly, utterly hilarious, a complete meme, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes sad... and pretty good! Yes. Except for the fourth season. Don't bother with that. *cough*

You need to put in some more effort if you want to become a Sugarian level Sailor Moon omega nerd there! Heh. Just kidding. It's not like she says a lot in German, but the EVA startup sequence in German was hilarious. It's painfully obvious that her voice actor is just a regular Japanese person who was given a few German words to say, with some pointers on how to try and pronounce them. It wasn't half bad, by the way. She did a good job saying "LCL" even, but it's all rather stilted in the way people sound when they have no actual knowledge of the language. Like the scenes where RLM makes fun of Russian Terminator in one of the Best of the Worst episodes. That's what friends ARE for! It made her switching the EVA to Japanese mode for Shinji's sake hilarious. One of the worst examples was in X-Files when the Cigarette Smoking Man calls someone in German and says - or at least tries to say - "Kennen Sie die MJ-Akten?" which literally translated means "Do you know the MJ files" but is better translated as "Are you familiar with the MJ files?" in the context. I had to go over that scene more than ten times until I figured out what he was trying to say. Gee. There's no way the (supposedly) German guy on the other end of the phone call had any idea what he said.

Also, funny coincidence. Couldn't fall asleep last night so I started thinking about this thread and came up with the idea of maybe asking @LadyCrimson to join watching Sailor Moon, after all she sometimes watches anime and she'd be the first woman I know who watched it (while there's a marked difference between the taget demographic's age and LC, she's closer to being the actual target demographic than we are, right? ). And lo, she shows up a handful of hours after the thought. Jung would say a thing or two about his concept of synchronicity here, which connects this even more to Sailor Moon. In a way. It's destiny, I tells ya all. That one's easy, it is in episode 8 where Ami shows up. Never mind knowing the game mechanics. I watched a bit more NGE. I'm halfway done. Not very surprisingly, Asuka's German is kind of bad for someone supposedly from Germany, and that's factoring in the low standards I have for people from Germany (sorry any Germans that might read this, especially Lexx, not sure where you're from... jest made in good fun, unless you're from around Dresden ). Ahem.

There's no need to run. Stay a while and watch Sailor Moon with us, Bartimaeus is like 8 episodes from being done. (Also, haven't read or seen Slayers )

Yes, Ami usually doesn't play video games. She even says she's never played a fighting game before, which makes this doubly worse. The writers clearly had no idea what they were writing about. Competitive fighting game playing is also really different from the casual fun you'd have in an arcade. Really, really different. While it of course depends on the game, it's often the two players just trying to hit each other with safe moves that can't be hard countered (mostly it is make a mistake and lose). If the game has combos that can be broken, then you won't see combos in high level play. Of course, knowing that in '96 is something else entirely, and then... there's the excuse that Ami, having never played the Sailor V arcade game, won that first try all the way back in the first season, a story beat taken directly from the manga where the arcade game gives out Ami's transformation pen and their communicators and the Sailor V in the game is somtimes actually Minako and talks to the girls through the game before they meet because the Sailor V game was made to be Sailor Guardian training, so best not to talk about that. Ami lacks the experience necessary to win, even if she was the most talented player ever. Makoto also played the arcade game, but little else, Rei I think has a console at home but is never really shown playing (Usagi plays once and ignores what she should be doing, like usual) and Minako might like to play, but win? Eh. Too bad that Firefox ate your first post, but watching Minako twice wasn't that bad, huh? Also really nice callback to how easy it is to get lost in a TV station (that was from waaaaay back when Mamoru's part time job was working at one). Loved the exchange between the girls on the rooftop. Even if the rest of the episode had been terrible, I would have liked it just for that. The audio quality during the singing, hum, I have no idea how well (or even if) Cherami Leigh can sing, so maybe that happened in editing and is the result of making the best of it? I don't know. By the way, you've passed the point of no return. This was the last monster of the week, and even actually the last time Sailor Moon said her piece. No more "in the name of the moon" from here on out.

Rewatched Sailor Moon episode 192.

I'm going to do something that I find rather distasteful, but honestly, I see no other way around that. I have had it with this particular user and the entire branch he's working at for a long while now. I've just received an e-mail demanding billing support (not asking for, demanding) because there are apparently one hundred unrated orders and "ain't nobody got time to check that", therefore we should do their work for them. For fun I've done a cursory glance at a solid sample size and noticed that some of them were confirmed as zero (i.e. someone manually checked the order and confirmed it to be unbillable for whatever reason) and the vast majority were orders from last month that are still open or became billable in April. This is going to be fun. I'm generally really accomodating and often don't bill special support requests to the branches even though we technically should, because I don't see the point of shuffling money around between branches. In this case however, I'll make an exception. I'm taking bets on how quickly he'll find someone who "got" time for that.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the manga only having 10 issues instead of the 13 or 14 that Naoko Takeuchi usually did. Maybe they thought they'd be getting more episodes, because it's strange that only Minako got an episode where she is the clear focus that also deals with her ongoing problems of being a school girl, wanting to be an idol and having to save the world. Ami spending time with the professor who found a comet wasn't a very good focus piece (and not a great episode either - not bad, just not great). It's also possible that the writers didn't really know what to do with the girls and therefore only gave Minako a S-Style episode. I'm almost glad they just made Makoto be nervous on TV, which makes sense for her, and didn't use her as punching bag or have her yell at people that have done nothing wrong. The last handful of episodes... KP hated them for reasons I don't entirely understand yet, because I'm like six episodes into NGE now, and while Shinji is a little whingy at times, so far he hasn't really been grating or problematic. The largest issue is pacing. There's only enough content in the final six episodes for maybe three. So there's some downtime in between the action, and then everything is crammed into the final episode. It would really have been nice to have an episode or two after the final confrontation, like in S. And finally the animation, well, there are bits and pieces that look pretty good, and others are consistently bad. Haruka for instance, I don't think there's any shot of her where she doesn't look like a bug eyed alien. I think almost the entire animation team left Toei after SuperS (Ikuko Ito certianly did, as well as any animators that left to do Revolutionary Girl Utena), so they probably hastily slapped a team together. I'd have to go back and check the comments, but it's possible. It's just that there's a lot of animated TV on air here that's anime without looking like modern era anime. There's the obvious stuff, of course, like Naruto, Pokemon, Dragonball or the two football shows that I never really liked. One of the biggest staples of German children's TV ever since the 70ies is Maya the Bee. It's so ubiquitous you could easily claim that anyone who grew up with German TV watched that show in one form or the other. Long before Sailor Moon. I was more thinking that they don't know any better because anime equals funny Japanese names and big eyes. I'm pretty sure The Flying House ran here too, but I've never seen much of it. I got lucky and was left alone to watch what I wanted. Within reason, of course, I didn't see Nightmare on Elm Street befor 13 or so. Utena... the character designs really do take some getting used to. Concerning Cardcaptor Sakura, I understand that. It does look the way it does and the English dub is terrible.

Th Führer would be proud of you.

I'm hard pressed to come up with any anime I've watched that could compare to Sailor Moon, and certainly not when it comes to the combination of art style, tone and tropes. Not very surprising either. When it came out it was something new born out of old genres. There's been plenty of super sentai anime and magical girl stuff, but a combination of the two that transcended the limitations of either genre and that doesn't happen too often. In the end, even though really popular entertainment is often overrated, in this particular case there's a reason why many fans attribute liking anime at all to having seen Sailor Moon. When I watch German clips of Sailor Moon, the YT commenters often state "This was the first anime I watched!" which is patently 100% untrue unless it was literally the first animated show you've seen on TV in Germany. The others usually don't follow such a distinctly anime animation style (even if Sailor Moon itself looks different, what with the budget and all), but were animes regardless. I'm not entirely sure where Cardcaptor Sakura is going (if anywhere at all). There's an early episode where she's stuck at home on a Sunday because she traded household chores with her brother, and like two thirds of the episode are spent on Sakura cleaning with the help of her friend, and the monster of the week is a completely non-threatening tree that just happens to grow out of the basement. That does sound boring, for some reason it isn't. It's completely adorable. The issue here is... the English dub is... oh boy. Bad. So bad. Then there's revolutionary girl Utena on which, as you already know, a lot of people invovled with Sailor Moon worked on. But that's decidedly less fun. There are still fun scenes, but it's made to make you think, not roll on the floor laughing or having your brain melt by way of fremdschämen (great German word for what you call second hand embarrassment, literally "foreign shame" i.e. the shame you feel when someone else does or experiences something incredibly embarrassing). Said it before, it bears repeating I guess, I know what you mean. If you had shown me screencaps of Steven Universe I wouldn't have watched it without an endorsement. Madoka proper - that is, the show made movies, is a total of four hours, i.e. 12 episodes with a net runtime of roughly 20 minutes each. The third movie came later (haven't seen it yet). The visuals, yes, initially at least, everything about the first two episodes (almost) is meant to set up this typical magica girl anime setting. Except for the one fight scene that is there where Mami scares off a bunch of, uhm, magical things. That look like this: If nothing else, Madoka has a great antagonist that's being consistently voted into the top 10 anime villains of all time - and that's from a show that came out in 2011. It's also one of the few times - if not the only - where the antaganoist is both the most vile thing imaginable but completely free of malice or even evil intent (the actions arguably are, the intent, however, isn't). Indeed, that's fine. It's pretty much all any entertainment can hope for if consumed outside of formative times. 's the nature of things. Obviously I agree. Even the supporting cast is usually great, unless they're (ab)used by the writers to carry the idiot ball for some forced conflict. Yes, looking at you Haruka. The most amazing thing is how the writers were able to occasionally make this both silly and meaningful at the same time. Hmmm. Time to watch episode 192 again.

What do you mean you're not rooting for Dracula?

SuperS or the show as a whole?

Sure thing, I wasn't entirely serious when I posted that, outside of actually liking the small bits from McD's more than their regular sized fries. That Steven's bits would be really terrible in real life is something else. Most of his food would probably be. Yeah, fittingly, IC's speed was the most... insane. He even blew through SuperS as if it wasn't terrible and sucks out all your motivation to watch. I never thought I would have this much fun revisiting Sailor Moon, even with SuperS factored in. Not trying to rain on your parade here, but Ami's First Love is also a special that ran concurrently with the SuperS movie. But there's no Pegasus. Wholeheartedly agee about the group coming to an end being sad. I'm sure there will be something else to watch and talk about, but... Sailor Moon was a pretty fun topic to discuss. Plus that anime will always be special for me of course. That's because Lindsay's a professional and knows what she's talking about. It's for the same reason I watch RLM's videos, but almost no other reviewers. They're all so full of... manure, and the more popular they become the worse it gets. I mean I get a laugh out of How It Should Have Ended or Honest Trailers for sure, but when I think of the people Lindsay Ellis used to make content with (or for) - Channel Awesome, dear god... there's a Nostalgia Critic episode where he talks to his reproduction organ which forces him to watch Sailor Moon because he's pretending to be 14 again and turned on by the transformation scenes. Ha ha, such funny. It's the same for video games, the only guy whose videos I watch is Joseph Anderson. Well, and the speedrun documentaries by Summoning Salt, but that's something else entirely. SU spoilers:

It by far and large is. We don't have to tell him about SuperS, that might put him off. edit: Wouldn't eat wedges on their own. Or fries for that matter. Or anything that's only potatoes. Except baked potatoes with a nice sauce. Hmmm. We used to make those in my parent's wood stove when we were kids. There are also streetfood stands in winter time offering these. Usually. Not this year. Meh.